Portrait de Yoshua Bengio

Yoshua Bengio

Membre académique principal
Chaire en IA Canada-CIFAR
Professeur titulaire, Université de Montréal, Département d'informatique et de recherche opérationnelle
Fondateur et Conseiller scientifique, Équipe de direction
Sujets de recherche
Apprentissage automatique médical
Apprentissage de représentations
Apprentissage par renforcement
Apprentissage profond
Causalité
Modèles génératifs
Modèles probabilistes
Modélisation moléculaire
Neurosciences computationnelles
Raisonnement
Réseaux de neurones en graphes
Réseaux de neurones récurrents
Théorie de l'apprentissage automatique
Traitement du langage naturel

Biographie

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Reconnu comme une sommité mondiale en intelligence artificielle, Yoshua Bengio s’est surtout distingué par son rôle de pionnier en apprentissage profond, ce qui lui a valu le prix A. M. Turing 2018, le « prix Nobel de l’informatique », avec Geoffrey Hinton et Yann LeCun. Il est professeur titulaire à l’Université de Montréal, fondateur et conseiller scientifique de Mila – Institut québécois d’intelligence artificielle, et codirige en tant que senior fellow le programme Apprentissage automatique, apprentissage biologique de l'Institut canadien de recherches avancées (CIFAR). Il occupe également la fonction de conseiller spécial et directeur scientifique fondateur d’IVADO.

En 2018, il a été l’informaticien qui a recueilli le plus grand nombre de nouvelles citations au monde. En 2019, il s’est vu décerner le prestigieux prix Killam. Depuis 2022, il détient le plus grand facteur d’impact (h-index) en informatique à l’échelle mondiale. Il est fellow de la Royal Society de Londres et de la Société royale du Canada, et officier de l’Ordre du Canada.

Soucieux des répercussions sociales de l’IA et de l’objectif que l’IA bénéficie à tous, il a contribué activement à la Déclaration de Montréal pour un développement responsable de l’intelligence artificielle.

Étudiants actuels

Collaborateur·rice alumni - McGill
Collaborateur·rice de recherche - Cambridge University
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Doctorat - UdeM
Visiteur de recherche indépendant
Co-superviseur⋅e :
Collaborateur·rice de recherche - N/A
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Doctorat - UdeM
Collaborateur·rice de recherche - KAIST
Collaborateur·rice alumni - UdeM
Co-superviseur⋅e :
Visiteur de recherche indépendant
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Doctorat - UdeM
Co-superviseur⋅e :
Doctorat - UdeM
Doctorat - UdeM
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Collaborateur·rice alumni - UdeM
Postdoctorat - UdeM
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Postdoctorat - UdeM
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Collaborateur·rice alumni
Collaborateur·rice alumni - UdeM
Doctorat - UdeM
Co-superviseur⋅e :
Doctorat - UdeM
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Visiteur de recherche indépendant - UdeM
Doctorat - UdeM
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Collaborateur·rice de recherche - Ying Wu Coll of Computing
Collaborateur·rice de recherche - University of Waterloo
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Collaborateur·rice alumni - Max-Planck-Institute for Intelligent Systems
Collaborateur·rice de recherche - UdeM
Co-superviseur⋅e :
Doctorat - UdeM
Postdoctorat - UdeM
Postdoctorat - UdeM
Doctorat - UdeM
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Collaborateur·rice alumni - UdeM
Postdoctorat
Co-superviseur⋅e :
Collaborateur·rice alumni - Polytechnique
Co-superviseur⋅e :
Doctorat - UdeM
Co-superviseur⋅e :
Collaborateur·rice de recherche
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Collaborateur·rice alumni - UdeM
Collaborateur·rice alumni - UdeM
Co-superviseur⋅e :
Doctorat - UdeM
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Collaborateur·rice de recherche
Collaborateur·rice de recherche - UdeM
Doctorat - McGill
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Doctorat - UdeM
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Collaborateur·rice alumni - McGill
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :

Publications

Robust and Controllable Object-Centric Learning through Energy-based Models
Tong Che
Boris Ivanovic
Marco Pavone
Humans are remarkably good at understanding and reasoning about complex visual scenes. The capability to decompose low-level observations in… (voir plus)to discrete objects allows us to build a grounded abstract representation and identify the compositional structure of the world. Accordingly, it is a crucial step for machine learning models to be capable of inferring objects and their properties from visual scenes without explicit supervision. However, existing works on object-centric representation learning either rely on tailor-made neural network modules or strong probabilistic assumptions in the underlying generative and inference processes. In this work, we present \ours, a conceptually simple and general approach to learning object-centric representations through an energy-based model. By forming a permutation-invariant energy function using vanilla attention blocks readily available in Transformers, we can infer object-centric latent variables via gradient-based MCMC methods where permutation equivariance is automatically guaranteed. We show that \ours can be easily integrated into existing architectures and can effectively extract high-quality object-centric representations, leading to better segmentation accuracy and competitive downstream task performance. Further, empirical evaluations show that \ours's learned representations are robust against distribution shift. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of \ours in systematic compositional generalization, by re-composing learned energy functions for novel scene generation and manipulation.
Stateful Active Facilitator: Coordination and Environmental Heterogeneity in Cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
Dianbo Liu
Tianmin Shu
Michael Mozer
Nicolas Heess
In cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning, a team of agents works together to achieve a common goal. Different environments or tasks… (voir plus) may require varying degrees of coordination among agents in order to achieve the goal in an optimal way. The nature of coordination will depend on the properties of the environment -- its spatial layout, distribution of obstacles, dynamics, etc. We term this variation of properties within an environment as heterogeneity. Existing literature has not sufficiently addressed the fact that different environments may have different levels of heterogeneity. We formalize the notions of coordination level and heterogeneity level of an environment and present HECOGrid, a suite of multi-agent RL environments that facilitates empirical evaluation of different MARL approaches across different levels of coordination and environmental heterogeneity by providing a quantitative control over coordination and heterogeneity levels of the environment. Further, we propose a Centralized Training Decentralized Execution learning approach called Stateful Active Facilitator (SAF) that enables agents to work efficiently in high-coordination and high-heterogeneity environments through a differentiable and shared knowledge source used during training and dynamic selection from a shared pool of policies. We evaluate SAF and compare its performance against baselines IPPO and MAPPO on HECOGrid. Our results show that SAF consistently outperforms the baselines across different tasks and different heterogeneity and coordination levels. We release the code for HECOGrid as well as all our experiments.
Leveraging the Third Dimension in Contrastive Learning
Sumukh K Aithal
Michael Curtis Mozer
Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) methods operate on unlabeled data to learn robust representations useful for downstream tasks. Most SSL metho… (voir plus)ds rely on augmentations obtained by transforming the 2D image pixel map. These augmentations ignore the fact that biological vision takes place in an immersive three-dimensional, temporally contiguous environment, and that low-level biological vision relies heavily on depth cues. Using a signal provided by a pretrained state-of-the-art monocular RGB-to-depth model (the \emph{Depth Prediction Transformer}, Ranftl et al., 2021), we explore two distinct approaches to incorporating depth signals into the SSL framework. First, we evaluate contrastive learning using an RGB+depth input representation. Second, we use the depth signal to generate novel views from slightly different camera positions, thereby producing a 3D augmentation for contrastive learning. We evaluate these two approaches on three different SSL methods -- BYOL, SimSiam, and SwAV -- using ImageNette (10 class subset of ImageNet), ImageNet-100 and ImageNet-1k datasets. We find that both approaches to incorporating depth signals improve the robustness and generalization of the baseline SSL methods, though the first approach (with depth-channel concatenation) is superior. For instance, BYOL with the additional depth channel leads to an increase in downstream classification accuracy from 85.3\% to 88.0\% on ImageNette and 84.1\% to 87.0\% on ImageNet-C.
Regeneration Learning: A Learning Paradigm for Data Generation
Xu Tan
Tao Qin
Jiang Bian
Tie-Yan Liu
Scalable Neural Network Algorithms for High Dimensional Data
Mukesh Soni
Marwan Ali Shnan
Benchmarking Graph Neural Networks
Vijay Prakash Dwivedi
Chaitanya K. Joshi
Thomas Laurent
Anh Tuan Luu
Xavier Bresson
Conditional Flow Matching: Simulation-Free Dynamic Optimal Transport
Constant Memory Attentive Neural Processes
Frederick Tung
Hossein Hajimirsadeghi
Mohamed Osama Ahmed
GFlowNets for AI-Driven Scientific Discovery
Tackling the most pressing problems for humanity, such as the climate crisis and the threat of global pandemics, requires accelerating the p… (voir plus)ace of scientific discovery. While science has traditionally relied on trial and error and even serendipity to a large extent, the last few decades have seen a surge of data-driven scientific discoveries. However, in order to truly leverage large-scale data sets and high-throughput experimental setups, machine learning methods will need to be further improved and better integrated in the scientific discovery pipeline. A key challenge for current machine learning methods in this context is the efficient exploration of very large search spaces, which requires techniques for estimating reducible (epistemic) uncertainty and generating sets of diverse and informative experiments to perform. This motivated a new probabilistic machine learning framework called GFlowNets, which can be applied in the modeling, hypotheses generation and experimental design stages of the experimental science loop. GFlowNets learn to sample from a distribution given indirectly by a reward function corresponding to an unnormalized probability, which enables sampling diverse, high-reward candidates. GFlowNets can also be used to form efficient and amortized Bayesian posterior estimators for causal models conditioned on the already acquired experimental data. Having such posterior models can then provide estimators of epistemic uncertainty and information gain that can drive an experimental design policy. Altogether, here we will argue that GFlowNets can become a valuable tool for AI-driven scientific discovery, especially in scenarios of very large candidate spaces where we have access to cheap but inaccurate measurements or to expensive but accurate measurements. This is a common setting in the context of drug and material discovery, which we use as examples throughout the paper.
GFlowOut: Dropout with Generative Flow Networks
Dianbo Liu
Bonaventure F. P. Dossou
Qianli Shen
Chris C. Emezue
Bayesian Inference offers principled tools to tackle many critical problems with modern neural networks such as poor calibration and general… (voir plus)ization, and data inefficiency. However, scaling Bayesian inference to large architectures is challenging and requires restrictive approximations. Monte Carlo Dropout has been widely used as a relatively cheap way for approximate Inference and to estimate uncertainty with deep neural networks. Traditionally, the dropout mask is sampled independently from a fixed distribution. Recent works show that the dropout mask can be viewed as a latent variable, which can be inferred with variational inference. These methods face two important challenges: (a) the posterior distribution over masks can be highly multi-modal which can be difficult to approximate with standard variational inference and (b) it is not trivial to fully utilize sample-dependent information and correlation among dropout masks to improve posterior estimation. In this work, we propose GFlowOut to address these issues. GFlowOut leverages the recently proposed probabilistic framework of Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets) to learn the posterior distribution over dropout masks. We empirically demonstrate that GFlowOut results in predictive distributions that generalize better to out-of-distribution data, and provide uncertainty estimates which lead to better performance in downstream tasks.
HyenaDNA: Long-Range Genomic Sequence Modeling at Single Nucleotide Resolution
Eric Nguyen
Michael Poli
Marjan Faizi
Armin W Thomas
Callum Birch-Sykes
Michael Wornow
Aman Patel
Clayton M. Rabideau
Stefano Ermon
Stephen Baccus
Christopher Re
Learning GFlowNets From Partial Episodes For Improved Convergence And Stability
Generative flow networks (GFlowNets) are a family of algorithms for training a sequential sampler of discrete objects under an unnormalized … (voir plus)target density and have been successfully used for various probabilistic modeling tasks. Existing training objectives for GFlowNets are either local to states or transitions, or propagate a reward signal over an entire sampling trajectory. We argue that these alternatives represent opposite ends of a gradient bias-variance tradeoff and propose a way to exploit this tradeoff to mitigate its harmful effects. Inspired by the TD(